On the Horizon: Nietzsche’s Lady Dawn and Deleuze’s Sky-Chance

This interpretation of Nietzsche’s (Zarathustra III) and Deleuze’s (Difference and Repetition) highly poetic passages on the Greek goddess Eos (Aurora, Dawn) and the “sky-chance”—set in the context of the eternal return—emphasizes the role in both thinkers of Greek cosmogony. Of particular importance are the notions (figures) of earth-sky and Chaos in its double-sense of disorder and earth-sky gap or interface, where the latter is also the extended surface of the “horizon.” Nietzsche calls Lady Dawn a “table for dice players” and “dance floor for accidents”—suggesting the momentary event of her appearance, her radical contingency—and an “abyss of light,” suggesting the possibility of upper-sky/deep-earth inversion. Deleuze speaks of the “dice” that are “thrown against the sky” or “sky-chance,” suggesting the singularity of repetition (of dawns, future possibilities) and radical openness of the future. His “hinge between two tables” seems to interpret Nietzsche’s horizontal gap or double-horizon as a porous, flat surface of time (Aion) “through which” the dice are thrown—suggesting the possibility not just of the vertical reversibility (inversion) of earth-sky but of a flattening-out or projection of the vertical dice-throw onto a horizontal table or game-board. But in the original Homeric myth Dawn rises into pure singularity from her horizon-couch, where she lies at night with her lover Tithonos, and this dualism of horizontal embedment and vertical singularity could describe the two sides or aspects of mytho-poetic-metaphysical language: its force of figuration—the horizontal “couching” of one thing or idea in terms of another—and its vertical singularity that lies beyond all embedment.